What was the largest battle in human history?

Factual Questions
1

I’d like to know, what was the largest battle in human history, in terms of the number of troops committed to the fight? What was the largest number of troops ever simultaneously committed on a single battle field?

The reason I’d like to know is, I’ve been a fan of the Robert Jordan fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, for quite a while now. And those books have quite a few epic battles in them. But as the series goes on, the battles seem to get bigger and bigger, with the numbers of people on the battlefield fighting going from hundreds and maybe thousands in the earlier books, to being in the hundred thousands in later books. It becomes kind of unbelievable and makes it hard to even imagine when the author says something like 10,000 people charge in from one side and then 50,000 more just pile in from the other side. I’m having trouble picturing something like that in my mind as even plausible, especially in a fantasy world where humans are fairly sparsely populated and still fight with swords and travel by horse.

Has anything on that scale ever happened in real human history? I think about recent wars since I’ve been alive, and it seems the total number of troops committed throughout years of war are less than what this author describes in a single battle.

2

Some sources will claim the Battle of Kursk. 900,000 Germans against nearly 2 million Russians:

3

The Battle of Stalingrad involved a million German and allied troops and more than 2 million Soviet troops, but they were never all in combat at the same time (it lasted five months). In antiquity there were battles of that sort, but it’s hard to say with any accuracy how many men were in the field because the relative sizes of the armies are generally exaggerated by the winning side.

4

Holy god, that’s alot of people to be fighting.

I wonder though, is it plausible that 50,000+ of those troops might have been involved in a single charge? It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to see 50,000 people charge over a hill trying to kill you.

5

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading history, it’s that until very recently military historians exaggerated the size of armies by a factor of 2, 5, or even 10.

Jordan might be aware of that and intentionally invoking it.

6

When I have trouble imagining that amount of people, I think of stadiums. A typical basketball arena can hold between 18-20k people, a football stadium maybe 4 times that. So imagine a 100k people at a stadium split into two and charging at each other with swords and axes, or your typical Raiders vs. Eagles game

7

Reading the accounts of Pickett’s Charge, (US Civil War, Gettysburg, PA), it was an awe inspiring site for the Union to see about 10,000 men marching toward them, over open ground one mile away. (I’m sure someone will come by and correct me if my numbers are completely off-base).

Anyway, if you think about multiplying that by 5, and you have 50,000 men marching toward you, I imagine it would be spectacular and intimidating all at the same time.

This would actually be the question that I would have. How many people AT ONE TIME marched upon another side in battle.

Pickett’s Charge must have been amazing. If you’ve ever been to Gettysburg, you can stand on both sides… On the Union side, looking toward the Confederate lines, there is a line of trees where the woods begin. Out of those woods came the 10,000. They marched the mile, and were blasted by cannon for almost the entire time. The union started using canister, or grape shot (basically turned the cannon into a huge shotgun) and would blow holes into the lines, and those men kept coming. I can’t imagine watching it from the Union side, and I can’t imagine going forward if I was a confederate. Those guys were insane.

You can actually walk the mile with a guide, and I highly recommend it if you ever make it to the battle field. It is amazing what those guys did, especially when you consider how many men were lost, and guys STILL made it the entire length of the field to fight briefly at the union center hand to hand. But they didn’t have any numbers to sustain an attack.

I honestly don’t think there are many more direct, frontal assaults like that in modern warfare. As mentioned, the numbers at Stalingrad were amazing, but they didn’t fight at one time, and as fat as I know didn’t try something like a frontal assault with 50,000 men, either. Weapons were too good, and that would be suicide. So to find a battle, I think one would have to go back in time, where arrows, catapults, and cruder weapons like that would make a large frontal assault at least have a chance at success.

8

In terms of battles where most participants were on foot and would have a reasonable chance of facing off within sight of each other in a day, there’s the Battle of Leipzig in the Napoleonic Wars with 600,000 participants.

9

The problem is that there are battles and then there are battles. Kursk gets called a battle because it was a continuous engagement between two armies over a particular goal, but there its similarity to something like Cannae ends. Kursk took place over two months and over a 2,000 mile front. Needless to say that was not how ancient or medieval battles typically played out :).

As noted pre-modern ( and even many modern ) observers were notoriously innumerate. It is very, very hard for most to eyeball a large crowd and guess at numbers from visual clues. Some more organized ancient states like Rome maybe had better estimates for at least their own forces because they used formed and named bodies of troops with specific theoretical strengths. But even then you have to be wary - real world formations rarely conformed to theoretical paper strength.

As we get to more modern sources and better record-keeping we start getting better numbers. But by then superior command and control means we get the inflation of “battle” to mean more than a single encounter on a single field over a day or two. For example the largest battle Napoleon was involved in at Leipzig featured ~600,000 soldiers. But if you start reading that wikipedia account you’ll quickly notice that that battle featured multiple discrete encounters that are also labeled battles - sub-battles as it were.

So you have to define your terms. Any battle period, one of the big Eastern Front engagements from WW II that are so labeled would probably win. But if you mean more traditional battles you’ll end with a much smaller number, as well as a likely much less accurate guess at the size of the armies engaged.

10

A factor to be considered is that in any military organization, the non-combatants will outnumber the actual fighters. If you have 900,000 Germans mobilized, only a relatively small percentage will be engaged in combat. The rest will be medics, mechanics, clerks, quartermasters, drivers, engineers, cooks, etc., etc., etc.

11

Or in the case if Thermopylae, by the losing side. :slight_smile:

12

Ancient armies could be pretty fucking big. A couple of data points:

The Battle of Thermopylae saw some seven thousand Greeks hold off a Persian army that numbered over 100,000 soldiers - contemporary reports that the Persians army numbered around a million were probably exageratons. That was in 490 BC. The invasion of Greece ended in 492, at the Battle of Palataea, saw about 200,000 combatants by modern estimates.

The Battle of Phillipi, part of a Roman civil war in 42 BC, saw as many as 400,000 combatants, although estimates are understandably rough.

Moving into the mdieval, armies tended to be a lot smaller. Still, for the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople in 717, the Umayyad Caliphate brought over 120,000 men and 3500 ships. It’s unclear how many defenders Constantinople had, but given that they won, it was probably quite a few.

That’s battles. In terms of individual troop movements within a battle, a lot of people cite the charge of the Polish heavy cavalry at the Siege of Vienna as the single largest cavalry charge in history, with 20,000 horse finally breaking the Turkish siege and rescuing the city.

Picket’s charge has been noted up thread, but was not the largest during the war, which might be Gaine’s Mill, which saw between 30,000 and 50,000 men in simultaneous assault along a two mile front.

And, of course, once you have radio, you get absolutely ridiculous numbers. The landings on D Day were part of a single, coordinated assault of over 150,000 men spread across I-don’t-even-know-how-many miles of beaches.

And all that’s just Europe and the US. I haven’t even mentioned China.

13

Depends on what you call a battle. I also thought of Leipzig.

For battles with a large number of combatants, and insane casualties, look no further the Taiping Rebellion. The third battle of Nanking had close to a million troops involved and the fighting was done without a lot of firearms.

14

The Battle of Verdun in WW1 deserves a mention. It lasted most of 1916, but it really was just one battle: the French were determined to hold on to Verdun, the Germans to take it. The French “won”, and casualties on both sides were astonishingly huge.

If you’re looking for a single event, on day one of the Battle of the Somme, also in 1916, the Brits lost 20 000 men killed and 40 000 wounded in the course of a couple of hours.

15

No. The generals who ordered it were the insane ones.

It was pretty clear by then, after several years of war, that the improved technology made this kind of assault foolish. Unless you had way more troops than the enemy, and could replace your losses when the enemy couldn’t. But most of the generals didn’t know what else to do, so they kept marching soldiers off to death.

16

Fair enough.

I know soldiers are taught not to question orders, but in the US Civil War, the south was not exactly fielding a professional army. They were farm boys and young men looking for adventure in many cases. Two years in, and they were battle hardened. But they were not well equipped or paid… Not to mention they weren’t fed or clothed properly. Maybe day to day life without th Internet was boring, so going off to war gave them some excitement.

Pickett’s charge was made by a ton of men who HAD to know they were probably going to die. Even the generals had to know this mass frontal assault had little chance at success. How they got their men to continue to walk forward in the face of all that firepower still amazes me. Many of these guys were walking barefoot, and yet they still had the discipline to march onl. If I was lucky enough to survive a canister blast that took out e guy to my left and right, I’d be thinking very strongly of turning around. My personal retreat.

17

Bingo – just picture an English football riot.

18

One way is the threat of death. If just one soldier refuses to move forward when they’re not currently undergoing direct fire, they might be forgiven, or they might be killed. It may be a better percentage bet to obey orders and charge.

Now, if a group of soldiers refuses to move forward, the chance of each individual being killed as a result decreases, but it’s still not a sure thing.

19

I’d just append this to modern military organizations. The further back in time you go, the smaller the percentage of non-combatants becomes.

20

The Battle of Evermore.